Meet Fuzzy Hall: The World’s Top Dirt Course Builder

Tim “Fuzzy” Hall’s ‘stash’ has nothing to do with drugs, but it has everything to do with dirt. This legendary BMX rider has stashes in every city where the AST Dew Tour stops, because he is the premier dirt course builder in the world, and builds all the courses for the tour.

“Building BMX courses has been my job for the last 12 years,” says the 38-year-old.

The dirt for each BMX course is about 1,200 yards, or 80 dump trucks worth. It comes from a man who has a family business that stores big stashes of dirt on leased parking lots all over America. The dirt is used in arenas for motocross or monster truck shows and rodeos, and used outdoors for action sport events like the Dew Tour and X Games.

The dirt pile for a BMX course is dumped exactly to Fuzzy’s specifications. It takes more than 12 hours to bring it in, and it’s massed about 30 feet high and 120 feet long. But before that, the course has already been in the works for many months.

“During the winter, we get an outline, a ‘footprint’ of where the course will be. We do some rough design drawings and send them out to the athletes so they can let us know what they like and what they don’t like. We build each course according to their feedback,” Fuzzy explains.

To keep the dirt sticking together, he mixes some 40 bags of Portland cement in with it. “Every lip and landing has two or three bags mixed in with the dirt to make it more cohesive,” Hall says.

To grade and build the dirt into a BMX course, he uses two Caterpillar Skid Steers, which are like small tanks with tracks that roll smoothly over the dirt, packing it down. He also uses — and operates — a bucket loader tractor and a ‘water buffalo,’ a water pumping device that wets down the dirt. It’s carried in the new big thing, a ‘UTV,’ a utility all-terrain vehicle.

When Fuzzy first started building courses, it would take him and his posse about two weeks. Now, with the right equipment and know-how, they do it in three to four days. Speed and efficiency is essential, since a multi-million dollar NBC show is at stake, and the course has to hold together under the enormous pressure of tire hits, thousands of times from practice to finals.

Fuzzy rides and tests the course every step of the way. It’s not fun, he says. “You have more chance of getting hurt in testing than in competing, because the dirt’s still soft and unpredictable. It has to get ridden in by the riders. You don’t know how the dirt will react on a virgin course, am I going to sink into the lip? Will I go farther than the landing is set and overshoot it? I’ve done that tons of times.”

Still, Hall the course builder is far from a retired rider. He still competes. “Every year they (Dew Tour) give me one wild card, and every year I say I’m done, I’m not competing, but then I do, because I start to miss it, I like being on my bike, I like hanging out with all my friends.”

And creating the course that they play on.

- by Wina Sturgeon
AdventureSportsWeekly.com